How to schedule your staff

Learning how to schedule your staff hours is a crucial aspect of running your business or nonprofit. Whether you want to schedule restaurant staff, nursing staff or volunteers for an event, you need the right solution and techniques to ensure schedules are produced accurately and on time. Given that managers surveyed advised that they spend around 25% of their time scheduling staff, learning how to efficiently schedule staff hours can have a positive effect on productivity.

When deciding on the best way to schedule staff hours, you need to take into account different considerations. For example, in the case of scheduling restaurant shifts, you should think about factors such as tipping and overtime. Here are some more elements that will help you create a fit for purpose staff schedule:

Appropriate cover for each shift to prevent over and under-staffing.

No mistakes such as double-scheduling and scheduling staff for work they haven’t been trained to do.

Not allocating too many shifts to staff because this can lead to overtime and therefore increased labor costs.

Deputy uses AI technology to build schedules based on analytics from data compiled from areas like sales, foot traffic numbers, and table reservations. With that information, the Auto-Scheduling feature forecasts demands and creates a schedule to make sure each shift is staffed with adequately staffed in terms of both workers and skills. To learn more, schedule time to chat with one of Deputy’s amazing reps:

Tips for scheduling your staff

Now that you’re aware of what an ideal staff schedule should contain, here are seven tips to demonstrate how to schedule your staff:

Although it may not always be possible to really get to know your staff – for example, you may not have the opportunity to identify strengths and weaknesses of seasonal employees – taking every opportunity to know your employees’ personality types and skills will help you to create the best schedule.

If you’re learning how to schedule employees in a restaurant, having a good knowledge of your staff will help you decide who will be placed at the front of house during busy periods. Similarly, if you’re figuring out how to schedule volunteers for an event, it will make sense to schedule those with clear leadership skills to oversee a group of volunteers.

Your staff scheduling tool should include an area for making notes. Some information such as relevant skills, part-time or full-time status or certifications can be included when you add an employee. However, character traits that you observe over a period of time can be added by editing your staff’s profile at a later date.

Deputy has recently rolled-out new employee profiles make it even simpler for you to manage important employee information. Sign up for free 30-day trial and see how Deputy can transform your business.

Adding notes about your hourly employees’ skills set will help you to allocate the most suitable people for different shifts. For example, when working on how to schedule nursing staff, making a note of who prefers early shifts will enable you to assign them to do prep work in the early hours of the morning.

2. Assign tasks

Things will run smoother when hourly workers are aware of their responsibilities. Assigning tasks is an efficient way of ensuring that all tasks are done. This is especially the case if the tasks are listed in a checklist format, where your hourly staff has to actively check-off the completed jobs. If you run a restaurant and are wondering how to schedule restaurant back of house cleaning, then Deputy’s My Task function is for you. You can add a list of mandatory tasks that need to be completed at different intervals to ensure that your hourly staff knows what is expected of them when they’re cleaning your restaurant’s back of house. The tasks that need to be listed to ensure a clean back of house in your restaurant should include:

Disinfect kitchen surfaces.

Organize food storage areas.

Deep clean equipment.

Drain and sanitize ice machines.

Assigning tasks is extremely useful when scheduling volunteers for an event. Where you’ve identified the roles at different stations, provide each volunteer with a list of tasks that need to be completed. Assigning tasks when scheduling volunteers cuts down on training time and give them some autonomy. You can track the completion of tasks using Deputy’s My Task feature. Therefore, you can give your volunteers a gentle reminder if a task isn’t completed within the specified time.

3. Arrange your employees’ schedule in advance

Planning your hourly employees’ schedule ahead of time is no longer an option for some employers. Predictive scheduling laws place obligations on eligible employers to provide hourly staff with their schedule in advance. These laws mostly apply to the fast food, retail, and hospitality industries so, if you’re trying to learn how to schedule employees for retail or restaurants, it’s advisable that you consider predictive scheduling legislation, even if these laws don’t apply to you at this time.

Apart from being a legal requirement for some employers, planning and providing schedules ahead of time saves you a headache and avoids confusion among your hourly staff. Your staff will also appreciate the courtesy of advance notice because they will be able to organize other aspects of their lives. When scheduling retail employees, consider that 31% of all workers are aged 24 and under and 29% of retail jobs are part-time. Therefore, it’s highly likely that some of your retail hourly employees will be students and will need time to organize work around their studies.

Ideally, calling in hourly employees on their days off to cover a shift will be kept to a minimum. This practice is known as being “on-call” and is often used in retail and restaurants. However, most predictive scheduling laws have limited or banned (in the case of New York City Fair Workweek) employees being on-call for some industries. There are some jobs where being on-call is part of the work. When determining how to schedule nursing staff, it may be unavoidable to have some nurses on standby in case you’re understaffed. In this instance, use a function like Deputy’s manager notification to keep you informed of last-minute changes so that you can make a request for a nurse who is on-call to attend work. Deputy’s Auto-Scheduling feature (see below) can also help employers fill their staff’s scheduling in advance; all with a single click of a button.

4. Create a communication method for the whole team

Irrespective of whether your hourly staff are in retail, restaurant, nursing, or any other industry, effective communication is essential to the success of your business. A key consideration when learning about how to schedule restaurant, retail or any other hourly staff is the need to keep everyone informed at the same time. Using email or text messages can be unreliable since there’s no way to be sure that your staff has received your messages.

Deputy’s Newsfeed enables you to communicate with individuals or your whole team. You can replace different types of communication methods with one simple tool. There will be no more excuses for not receiving communication because Deputy’s Newsfeed provides you with the option to get confirmation when your message has been read. You’re also able to include attachments, like updated handbooks, to inform your employees of any changes and to keep you compliant with the provisions of new laws around notifying staff.

When scheduling nursing staff, your communication needs to be clear and timely. Whether you’re creating nursing schedules for a local healthcare practice or an emergency room, errors or delays in communication could have negative consequences for patients. Deputy’s Newsfeed provides the peace of mind that all of your nurses will be kept up to date in real time about developments that will affect them and their patients.

Effective communication is also crucial when finding out how to schedule volunteers for an event. Using Deputy’s Newsfeed, you can provide updates and reminders about what needs to be done on the day, so that all volunteers are aware of what will be happening and what is expected of them.

5. Enable your employees to swap shifts

Part of the learning curve when getting to grips with how to schedule staff hours is enabling your employees to swap shifts on their own. Employees will need to exchange shifts with their colleagues at some point. Traditionally, employees would need to make this request via a manager. The manager would then need to find a suitable replacement and ask this employee whether they could cover the shift. This process is inefficient and gives the manager unnecessary work.

Employees can be given the autonomy to swap their shifts with a simple process. Deputy’s shift swap feature enables your employees to offer their shifts to suitable colleagues. To ensure that only appropriate colleagues can exchange shifts, you’re able to select specific criteria, like pay scale and skill level. For example, as hourly staff are entitled to overtime pay after working 40 hours, you could choose to be notified when a shift swap will result in overtime. You also have the option to approve the shift swap after you ensure that everything is in order. Whether your hourly workers are employees or volunteers, they will appreciate the independence to work with their colleagues to swap shifts.

6. Try to accommodate leave requests

When discovering how to schedule staff, leave and time-off management is an important part of the process. Having a clear and fair leave policy helps to keep your staff happy, regardless of whether you operate in the retail, restaurant, healthcare industries, or the non-profit sector.

Since different staff have specific leave requirements, accommodating requests for time-off can be time-consuming. Deputy’s leave management function helps you to manage the full cycle of time-off requests, including:

When determining how to schedule staff and volunteers, you should make it easy for them to track their leave. Deputy keeps your employees informed about their leave allowance, which empowers them to plan their time-off more properly.

7. Use the most effective scheduling tool

The ease and accuracy of scheduling your staff will largely depend on the tools you use. Traditional manual methods, like pen and paper, can create frustration, especially as your team grows. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to schedule employees in a restaurant with all of the different functions, including front and back of house cleaning on a piece of paper?

Some business owners may regard using Excel spreadsheets as a step-up from pen and paper. They would be right in some ways. But then again, think about how complicated arranging shifts would be if you were in healthcare and had to use a spreadsheet to schedule nurses’ shifts. Firstly, you would need to learn complex formulas and, secondly, you would face challenges when making amendments and notifying nurses of changes.

Technology has progressed significantly and you should use this to your advantage by choosing a cloud-based workforce management solution like Deputy. With Deputy, learning how to schedule staff in any industry is simple. That is why it’s a trusted resource for multiple industries including:

Deputy provides all the functionality required to schedule your staff and to help you save on labor costs because you’re able to fully cost your shift before publishing. Features like Auto-Scheduling enable you to speed-up the scheduling process. It’s likely that you’re already using other cloud-based tools to run your business, so Deputy integrates with some of the most well-known apps to provide you with a seamless experience.

With Deputy, learning how to schedule staff and volunteers doesn’t have to be time-consuming or complicated. Try Deputy for free and see how Deputy intuitively works with your business to schedule your staff or volunteers.

What is the difference between revenue and profit?

Knowing the difference between revenue and profit is essential for the financial health of your business. The words revenue and profit are generally used synonymously, but they represent different things on your company’s income statement.

In short:

Revenue is the money your business makes from different activities – for example, selling goods or delivering services.

Profit is what is left over after you’ve paid all of your expenses and bills.

Accounting terms

As well as understanding the difference between revenue and profit, there are also some other terms that you should familiarize yourself with when getting to grips with your company’s financial health. Accountants are experts in finance and will often use terms that you may not fully understand. Having a basic knowledge of what different accounting terms mean will help you to keep up with what your accountant is doing. After all, as a business owner, you are ultimately responsible for your accounts. Having a grasp of accounting terms is of particular importance when preparing and submitting your tax return because inaccurate information can lead to fines for your business.

Even though you may use accounting software which automates some functions, like linking the number of hours your employees work directly to payroll, you should still aim to have an understanding of accounting terms to be certain that you’re including the right numbers in the appropriate places. Below are descriptions of revenue and profit and related accounting terms to help you distinguish between crucial financial terms:

A more comprehensive definition of revenue is the amount you receive from the sale of goods and services and from other day to day operations. Therefore, revenue is earned every time you sell something for either credit or cash. The revenue produced from your sales is known as your turnover. There are two types of revenue:

Operating revenue is generated from your usual business activities.

Non-operating revenue is produced by other business activities, such as rent and dividends.

The full definition of profit is the financial gain your company makes when the amount you earn from selling goods and services is more than what you spend on producing or buying the goods and other expenses. The following are the two types of profit:

Gross profit is the profit after you subtract your trading expenses from your sales.

Net profit is the profit after you deduct administration, office and selling expenses and other expenses from your revenue.

Revenue vs. profit – a side by side comparison chart

Revenue

Profit

Definition

Generated from sales of goods and services over a specified period.

Balance (after subtracting expenses and tax).

Formula

Revenue = total sales – total returns.

Profit = total revenue – total expenses.

Types

Different types – operating revenue, and non- operating revenue.

Different types – gross profit and net profit.

Position on financial statement

Recorded on the trading account.

Recorded on the income statement.

Importance

Necessary for operating a business.

Necessary for business growth and survival.

2. Revenue vs. sales

Similar to revenue and profit, some people also use the terms revenue and sales interchangeably. However, they mean different things for your business. As explained above, revenue means income that your business makes from operating activities (everyday business activities) and non-operating activities (for example, selling equipment that you no longer use).

The definition of sales is the income you accumulate from selling goods or services over a specified period.

3. Sales revenue

Sales revenue can also be used to refer to sales and is the amount generated by your business from the goods or services you sell – for example, if a retailer’s core business is selling shoes. Whatever the retailer earns over a specified period of time from selling shoes is its sales revenue. If this retailer has an investment of $1 million and earns $100,000 per year, this won’t be counted as part of its sales revenue.

Your sales revenue is generally reported over a specified period of time, such as monthly, quarterly or annually. Sales revenue should be compared against your net profits to determine the percentage of sales revenue that ends up as profit.

The following are two categories of sales revenue:

Gross sales revenue means all the billings and receipts you receive from selling your goods and services. This amount does not contain deductions from sales returns and allowances. Price reductions (or rebates) given to customers as an incentive to keep items instead of returning them are known as allowances.

Net sales revenue also referred to as net sales or net revenue is the money you generate from your transactions with customers. Net sales revenue is the total amount that you’ve made from sales subtracting product returns and allowances.

Net sales revenue also consists of discounts from some types of sales discounts. For instance, a company may offer an item for sale for $2,000, but give a 10% discount where a customer pays the whole price upfront instead of opting for an installment plan. In this instance, the company would have $2,000 gross revenue, a $200 discount and $1,800 for net sales revenue.

Net sales revenue gives a better representation of how much money you get from your customers and clients. To work out your net sales revenue, subtract any sales and allowances from your sales revenue amount.

4. Gross revenue

The definition of gross revenue is the total amount of your sales over a specified period before any deductions are made. This amount will provide you with insight into your business capability to sell goods and services, but it doesn’t give an indication of whether you are making a profit. It follows that, if someone is buying a business, the focus should not be on gross revenue. An exception to this is if the business in question is service-based where there are no returns. Sales returns and sales discounts are deductions from gross revenue. After these deductions from gross revenue have been made, the remainder is known as net sales or net revenue.

5. Gross income vs. net income

Income statements for your business must account for both gross and net income. Working out your gross and net income shows you what your biggest expenses are and also shows you your top-performing goods. You also need to provide details of your gross income and your net income when completing and submitting your tax return.

Gross income is made up of all of the income earned through your business over the year. To work out your gross income, add up the following for the year:

Checks

Cash

Credit card charges

Interest and dividends

Rental income

Promissory notes

Canceled debts

Kickbacks

Damages and lost income payments

In order to work out your gross income, there should be no deductions applied.

Net income consists of the profit your business makes after you subtract business expenses and deductibles from your gross income. You must subtract business expenses from your gross income to calculate your net income. The following are common business expenses that can be deducted from your gross income:

Net income is the figure that represents the bottom line of how a business is performing. Net income is the profit that has been generated by a business. In the event that more money went out of a business than the amount that came in, the business isn’t profitable for the specified period since it has a net loss.

Therefore, gross income versus net income is all about your annual business income versus the profit your business makes for the year.

6. Gross profits

You arrive at your gross profit by subtracting the value of goods that your customer has returned and sales discounts. The cost of goods sold deducted from your revenue is also used to calculate your gross profit. The cost of goods sold is defined as the cost you are responsible for in relation to manufacturing or selling your products. An example of a retailer’s cost of goods will be the amount they pay for their merchandise that will be sold to their customers. Your gross profit will let you know how much your business earned from selling goods and services before taking out administrative expenses.

7. Net profit

The definition of net profit is the number of sales dollars you have left after all operating expenses, taxes, interests, and preferred stock dividends (not common stock dividends) have been subtracted from your company’s total revenue. You’ll find your net profit on the last line of your company’s income statement. Net profit is also known as the company’s net income, bottom line or net earnings.

The following is the formula for net profit:

Total revenue – total expenses = net profit.

Example:
Here’s an example of an income statement showing how the net profit is worked out:

Total revenue –$50,000

Cost of goods sold –$10,000

Gross profit – $40,000

Operating expenses:

Employee wages – $5,000

Utilities – $5,000

Rent – $5,000

Vehicle operation costs – $5,000

Total Operating expenses –$20,000

Taxes –$5,000

Net Profit – $15,000

According to this formula, the net profit has been worked out as = $50,000 – $10,000 – $5,000 – $5,000 – $5,000 – $5,000 – $5,000 = $15,000

Net profit is one of the best indicators of a company’s financial health. Where a company has shareholders, the net profit is closely scrutinized because this determines how much the shareholders will receive.

Grow your Business

From the definitions above, it’s clear that there’s a difference between revenue and profit. To make matters more confusing, there are also other terms that are used synonymously with revenue and profit. The main point is that you know what each of the terms means for your business.

One of the most important keys to note is that your profit will originate from your revenue. Therefore, it’s vital to track both your revenue and profit if you want to grow your business. Analyzing your financial statements to take the necessary action is the next step after understanding what the terms mean.

One of the biggest expenses for business is employee wages. This amount can fluctuate if you employ hourly workers. To ensure that your employees are being paid the right amount according to the shifts they’ve worked and to make informed decisions about the profitability of using a certain number of employees at given periods, you should utilize a workforce management software that integrates with your payroll system.

Deputy integrates seamlessly with your payroll system to provide you with an easy way to determine how employee wages affect your profits. Schedule time to chat with one of our team members below to see how Deputy’s low-cost workforce management system can have a positive effect on your company’s bottom line.

Seasonality has the potential to impact any business – positively or negatively. For hairdressing business owners in particular, understanding seasonal trends can be the difference between massive growth and losing customers. Here’s how you can track seasonality in hairdressing and use those insights to your advantage.

Managing a seasonal labour force

Hairdressing services make up 85% of the total revenue of salons, so getting the right staff into your business is crucial to ongoing success. But hairdressing is also a service industry mostly driven by part-time labour. This means it can be difficult to manage fluctuating rosters and employees only working for a few months at a time.

Streamlining the most time-intensive tasks of your business can free you up to focus on finding and retaining a quality workforce. An online rostering management solution, for example, can reduce the hours you might spend every week drawing up roster plans, reconfiguring timetables to suit part-time staff and adding new employees every month or two.

Similarly, tracking seasonal changes and staff with workforce-management tools, particularly those that integrate with your current online resources, can offer insights to stay on top of trends and patterns.

Monitor your customer base – and build custom services around them

Everyone has a different ‘system’ for getting their hair cut. Some may visit their hairdresser once a fortnight for a colour touch-up, while others can go months at a time without a trim. For the most part, men and women also have vastly different priorities in terms how – and how frequently – they visit a hairdressing salon. Understanding the wildly different needs of your customer base can play a huge role in boosting cash flow.

Whenever a customer finishes their appointment, make note of their stylist, their cut, whether their style or colour requires more frequent visit for maintenance, and then urge them to make an appointment at an appropriate time for their next visit. By reiterating why they should rebook, and confirming they will enjoy the same style and convenience of appointment as last time, you can overcome seasonality issues before they appear.

Remember: the appointment book is a business owner’s best retention program.

Embrace the changing seasons with promos

Instead of worrying about an expected trough in business, build a strategy around using it to your advantage. For example, create a promotion around Mother’s Day that offers a standard cut with free add-ons such as a head massage or deluxe hair treatment. For the men, you could include a free beard-trimming service on Father’s Day or their birthday.

Off-peak seasons are also the best time to run promotions. Include additional incentives in the regular price of a hairdressing service, offer customer-referral discounts on your social media platforms, or even consider upping your marketing spend. Perhaps most important is to raise and lower your inventory levels in line with anticipated busy and quiet periods – that way you’ll never be over or understocked.

However you decide to tackle seasonal changes, take the time to review industry trends and prepare for expected highs and lows throughout the year. An updated marketing strategy for your hairdressing business can do exactly that.

Managing a hairdressing business is unlike any other industry. It relies heavily on part-time labour, it has seasonal challenges that can change from year to year, and it’s a highly competitive market that relies on delivering a consistent customer experience. However, taking advantage of online solutions and developing a comprehensive business strategy can see you not only understand seasonality, but use it to your advantage.

Introducing Auto-Scheduling

When my co-founder (Steve Shelley) and I first created Deputy, we had a simple goal in mind – Make it easier for Steve to manage his growing team of shift workers, so he could spend more time focused on big ideas and less time worrying about scheduling.

Today, Deputy is all grown up, and helps a lot more people than just Steve! Since 2008 we’ve served over 75,000 businesses, scheduled more than a million workers, and powered 100 million shifts!

It’s now our mission to change the lives of shift workers, globally. Which is why we’re more excited than ever to announce a new feature that is truly a massive leap on this journey. It’s a feature that will radically transform the lives of every business owner or staff member that creates schedules in shift based businesses.

It’s called Auto-Scheduling, and it’s awesome.

With a single click, Auto-Scheduling will build you the perfect shift structure from scratch, then fill it with the right people for every shift based on your scheduling priorities.

If you currently use our Auto-Fill feature, some of this might sound familiar, which is right. But Auto-Scheduling is a whole lot more than Auto-Fill. Using Auto-Scheduling, you can build and fill your schedule, all with with a single click.

Easy, right!?

Scheduling: The highly complex problem!

Creating the right schedule is hard. For many business owners it requires a lot of time and effort, and results in unnecessary stress that takes time away from the jobs that really matter – like looking after customers.

Firstly, you have to determine how many shifts you need. This usually involves some pretty tedious calculations that account for the day of the week, the season and how many sales you think you’ll make – and that’s before you start thinking about the things you don’t control, like the weather, or extra crowds on their way to the big game.

As if that isn’t hard enough, you then need to balance a bunch of competing business priorities and compliance requirements to fill your shifts in a way that works for you and your staff. Not easy!

The way most business owners solve this puzzle is a healthy dose of intuition, relying on the tribal knowledge that comes with intimately knowing your own business to create the best schedule possible. Which might work at times, but it’s not perfect.

Put simply, there’s just too much complexity and too little time to consider everything, resulting in suboptimal schedules that cost businesses real money and create significant risk from a compliance perspective.

That’s why we’ve created Auto-Scheduling. Auto-Scheduling takes the effort and the guesswork out of scheduling. It allows you to account for every factor that influences how many staff you’ll need at any time, and for every rule that determines when your staff should or shouldn’t be working. It codifies your tribal knowledge, and empowers your managers to create the best schedule every time.

The best part? Once you’re set up, it does all of this with a single click.

How it works

1. Adding your Demand Signals

Auto-Scheduling uses artificial intelligence to build you the best shift structure for your business, based on as many demand signals as you require. Put simply, a demand signal is anything that affects how many people you need working at any given time.

Let’s take a small cafe for example. As owners of the cafe, we know that extra staff are needed for the pre-work coffee rush, then less through the morning, until 11 or so when the brunch crowds roll in and things get crazy. But understanding exactly how many staff we need at any given time is based on tribal knowledge, not science.

Using artificial intelligence, Auto-Scheduling can analyse historical and forecast data from multiple demand signals, like sales, foot traffic numbers, and table bookings, to accurately forecast how many staff the coffee shop would need for each hour of the day.

Demand signals can be broken down even further to forecast staffing requirements with greater accuracy. For example, more coffee orders require more baristas, and more menu orders mean you need more people in the kitchen and waiting tables. And for more accurate start and stop times, data can be broken into 15 minute blocks.

In Deputy, we’ve made it super easy to add your own demand signals and import relevant data. Simply click ‘add new metric’ for each demand signal in the far left corner of the scheduling page.

Adding a new demand signal

You can then input data for each signal manually, import it using CSV or Excel files, or even set it up to pull automatically from other apps, like your point of sales system.

Importing CSV file

For each demand signal, you can forecast labour demand using insights from recent periods (like the past month), or even the same time last year. Using the same period last year allows you to accurately account for the staffing impact of one off, major events, like the big games or public holidays.

Enterprise customers can also integrate with 3rd party applications, like the weather, movement patterns, or Google traffic, so you can better manage the impact of the things you can’t control.

2. Required Staff Builder

Using the Required Staff builder, you then determine the exact number of staff to schedule in each area, based on each demand signal. We call these ‘Required Staff recipes’. Building your Required Staff recipe means any schedule created is completely optimised for your specific business and scheduling needs.

Continuing with our cafe example, we can set the Required Staff builder to schedule one barista for every 60 coffee orders expected each hour, and one chef for every 20 meals ordered. We can also make sure we’ve got one waiter for every 30 people that come through the door.

Building Demand Signals

I’ve used basic numbers here as an example, but as a business owner I’m sure you’ll have a clear idea about the labour ratios required for your business, so you can get more specific. If not, you can always test and adapt your Required Staff recipes on the go, figuring out the best labour ratio for your business over time.

Required Staff recipes makes your ‘tribal knowledge’ instantly available to you, and every staff member who creates schedules for your business. Every time a schedule is created using Auto-Scheduling, it will be based on the specific Required Staff recipes you have developed.

And because every location is different, Auto-Scheduling lets you build custom recipes for each one. Meaning each schedule is optimised for each location.

Once you’ve set up your demand signals and built your Required Staff recipe(s), Auto-Scheduling will take care of the heavy lifting and build you the best schedule again and again, with a single click.

3. Building your shift structure

This is when the magic starts.

Whilst you can achieve the following two steps with a single click (using the ‘Auto’ button), I’ll describe it in two using the drop down menu with Auto-build and Auto-fill fill buttons.

Using data from each of your demand signals and your Required Staff recipes, Auto-Scheduling will build you the optimum shift structure (a series of blank unassigned shifts in assigned areas with start/end times).

An optimum shift structure means you have the right amount of people working in every area, at all times. For our coffee shop, that means no wait staff lounging around out back, and enough baristas out front to make sure the line for coffee isn’t out the door, losing you precious sales.

Auto Build your shift structure

For Auto-Build to create your shift structure, you simply need to fill in 3 criteria.

Preferred Shift Lengths – The relevant shift lengths for your business. This ensures Auto-Scheduling won’t create a shift that’s shorter or longer than what works for your business.

Desired Schedule model logic – We expect most customers to use the Required Staff logic (using the recipes set up above), but there is also the option for Auto-Scheduling to copy and learn from previous schedules, or simply schedule the minimum coverage required for each area (1 person per area, at all times).

Shift start times – Whether you want each shift to start on the hour, or let Deputy learn what start times will best suit your business.

Once you’re happy, simply click the button and Auto-Scheduling will analyse your demand signals, Required Staff recipes and the relevant criteria to create an optimised shift structure for your business.

4. Filling your shifts

Once you have your shift structure, Auto-Scheduling can then go about filling it with the best person for every shift, based on your scheduling priorities.

You can use our pre-set priorities, such as:

Keeping the cost as low as possible

Ensuring equal amount of hours amongst your staff

Using past schedules & preferences as a guide

Ensure you are NOT breaking any compliance laws

Or, you can create customised priorities (referred to as Auto-Fill Advanced Recipes) to account for more complex labour and wage rules in your state or country.

Set your priorities for Auto Fill

Then just click the button, and that’s it.

Auto-Scheduling will evaluate all possible combinations to provide you with an optimised, legally compliant schedule for your business.

Auto fill doing its magic!

It will never schedule staff into overtime hours, or ask them to work during their time-off. It will build the best schedule it can find within the boundaries of the business rules that you’ve defined.

Now can you see why were so excited? We’re always looking for ways to make life easier for businesses with shift based workers. Scheduling your team in a single click? Now that’s easy.

Benefits to your business

Single Click Scheduling – Save time, money and energy without cutting corners. With Auto-scheduling you can create the best schedule for your business with a single click. Accurately forecast labour demand – Auto-Scheduling takes the guesswork out of building your shift structure. Accurately forecast how many people you need at any time, using multiple demand signals (like sales, foot traffic and bookings). No more surprises – Use historical and third party insights to forecast the manage of things you can’t control, like weather or major events. With auto-scheduling you’ll always have the right amount of staff when it matters most. The right team, every time – Set your priorities, like lowest cost, shift equality or matching past preferences, and Auto-Scheduling will fill your schedule with the best team to match your business needs.

Auto-scheduling also learns who your best staff are (the ones that turn up on time, and don’t pull out last minute) and makes sure they’re rostered on when you need them most. Manage your compliance worries – Set the scheduling rules for your business (and any other important conditions, like making sure you’ve always got someone with First Aid on site) and let your compliance worries fade away.Once you’ve set the right rules, Auto-Scheduling will create optimised, legally compliant schedules every time.

Sound amazing but not sure how it would work for your business? No problem.

I will be running a live Webinar next Wednesday (7pm, April 4 April EDT) / Thursday (9am, April 5 AEST). Click here to sign up.

Alternatively, check out our handy Help Docs for more detail on how to set your business up with Auto-Scheduling.

When Steve and I founded Deputy 8 years ago, our founding vision was to improve the working lives of business owners and employees. That’s why we called ourselves “Deputy”. Deputy is the second in charge to every business owner and employee.

We had no idea we would be where we are today.

Fast forward to 2017, we have

80 employees

Offices in 4 countries

Over 28,000 customers

Customers in 70 countries (on every continent)

450,000 users

Over 60,000,000 shifts handled

Sometimes it feels like a dream but honestly it has been a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

Today marks another milestone in our journey. I am super excited to announce that Boston-based VC fund OpenView Partners has invested $25M USD (~33.2M AUD) in Deputy. This will help us further accelerate our product roadmap, ignite new product development and supercharge our GoToMarket strategies!

What does it mean for you (customers)?

Only one thing – more awesomeness in Deputy! You have seen us ship over 150 new features in 2016. As we went into the holiday break, we released Auto Scheduling (details coming soon), tabs for multi tasking, android update, custom pay rates, and many more useful new features. We will accelerate our development roadmap even further in 2017 and beyond. We have great product upgrades in the pipeline which will further improve your working lives. To achieve all this, we’ll need to double the headcount of our engineering team! Check out all the new openings here.

Not a Deputy customer yet?

I am surprised to see how some of the most technologically advanced companies run their timesheets and employee scheduling on spreadsheets! I can only imagine the inefficiencies and frustrations, not to mention the costly mistakes that are made. Even those who have a competitive solution often suffer a broken experience. Just last month, I was at the airport when I noticed our competition’s time clock up on the wall.

I asked the staff, “Do you guys like using *****?” One woman answered, “Oh, it doesn’t work. I have to walk to the other building and clock on there”. Normally I would have a chuckle but what I really felt right then was the burning desire to make this a better world. Here is a mother working at 11pm at night, with family and kids at home, and she has to go through this nonsense!

With OpenView, we will expand our marketing, our sales and seamless onboarding! We are going to make Deputy more accessible. One unique thing about Deputy is that we can be used by a small business like Da Vinci’s Donuts while at the same time, we help with workforce planning for the giant Flying Kangaroo (Qantas). We get our greatest satisfaction when we help a small business scale rapidly, we have done with Gelato Messina in Australia and MakeSpace in New York. No matter what size your business is, Deputy is here to help.

A slide from our investor pitch deck

Why OpenView?

There was no shortage of Venture Capital interest in Deputy. We are in a growth stage where we invest in every dollar earned into growing the business. We didn’t need to raise any money as we have been growing 450% YoY. For us, a VC partnership should be all about the experience and expertise they bring to the mission of scaling our business. This is where we believe OpenView is different from every other institutional VC. They are not only great people but they have an expansion team that will complement Deputy to help us be better at everything.

If you’d like a behind-the-scenes view of how OpenView approached this deal, I’d recommend you read this eloquent and interesting account from Howard Leibman of Equity Ventures, who has advised us throughout the capital-raising process.

Anyway, the thing that attracted me most about OpenView is they care about our mission and our customers. They understand the challenges of being a shift worker and running a business with shift workers. It is very reassuring to work with someone who shares the same values as Steve and I do. A case in point is that Ricky Pelletier’s parents were both shift workers, just as both of my parents are still shift workers. Ricky is joining Deputy’s Advisory Board. Dan Demmer (joining our Board) brings a wealth of expertise in scaling businesses. After we signed the term sheet we didn’t celebrate with champagne, we rather walked down to our closest Gelato Messina (Deputy customer) for Australia’s best Gelato.

As a company we have operated without a CEO for quite sometime. My expertise is product and technology, which is why I have been serving in the role of CTO. The board has now decided that I should also serve in the office of CEO. I feel extremely honored to have this role, as Deputy has been my life’s work. One thing Steve Shelley has taught me is that good managers grow the people they lead, ultimately making themselves redundant. In this same philosophy, I will also announce that nothing will make me more proud to have someone more passionate, dedicated, hardworking than I am in leading Deputy. So if you think you have what it takes to do one of my jobs (CEO or CTO) in future, apply here.

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